Though Universal has released this disc on a label normally reserved for its crossover artists, this is nevertheless a serious collection of unaccompanied liturgical music from the Spanish golden age. All of it was probably performed in the pilgrimage centre of Santiago di Compostela, to where John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir made a musical journey across Europe last year. Their performances are exquisite and recorded in a church acoustic with just the right amount of reverberation (in Holborn, London, though, rather than Spain).

All the great composers from 16th-century Spain are represented; there are two pieces each by Guerrero and Victoria, and two by Alonso Lobo, one of them his 20-minute setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, with music by Manuel Cardoso and Philippe Rogier too. Altogether it makes a wonderful introduction to one of the great treasuries of renaissance polyphony.